to free religious discussion,
and to the dissemination of Gospel truth. Sarpi is strong in his praise
of Fra Fulgenzio for fearlessly preaching Christ and the truth, and
repeats the Pope's complaint that the Bible is injurious to the Catholic
faith.[164] He led William Bedell, chaplain to Sir H. Wotton and
afterwards Bishop of Kilmore, to believe that Fra Fulgenzio and himself
were ripe for Reform. 'These two I know,' writes Bedell to Prince Henry,
'as having practiced with them, to desire nothing so much as the
Reformation of the Church, and, in a word, for the substance of religion
they are wholly ours.'[165] During the interdict Diodati came from
Geneva to Venice, and Sarpi informed him that some 12,000 persons in the
city wished for rupture with Rome; but the government and the
aristocracy being against it, nothing could be done.[166]

[Footnote 162: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 283.]

[Footnote 163: _Ib._ p. 110, 311.]

[Footnote 164: _Ib._ vol. i. pp. 220, 222, 225, 231, 239.]

[Footnote 165: Campbell's _Life_, p. 132.]

[Footnote 166: _Ib._ p. 133, 135.]

Enough has now been quoted to throw some light upon Sarpi's attitude
toward Protestantism. That he most earnestly desired the overthrow of
ultra-papal Catholicism, is apparent. So also are his sympathies with
those reformed nations which enjoyed liberty of conscience and
independence of ecclesiastical control. Yet his first duty was to
Venice; and since the State remained Catholic, he personally had no
intention of quitting the communion into which he had been born and in
which he was an ordained priest. All Churches, he wrote in one memorable
letter to Casaubon, have their imperfections. The Church of Corinth, in
the days of the Apostles, was corrupt.[167] 'The fabric of the Church of
God,' being on earth, cannot expect immunity from earthly
frailties.[168] Such imperfections and such frailties as the Catholic
Church shared with all things of this world, Sarpi was willing to
tolerate. The deformation of that Church by Rome and Jesuitry he
manfully withstood; but he saw no valid reason why he should abandon her
for Protestantism. In his own conscience he remained free to serve God
in spirit and in truth. The mind of the man in fact was too far-seeing
and too philosophical to exchange old lamps for new without a better
prospect of attaining to absolute truth than the dissenters from
Catholicism afforded. His interest in Protestant, as separate from
Catholic Ref